Anne Wysocki and Dennis Lynch's "The Dismissed: On the Pasts and Potential Futures of Emotion and the Visual in Writing Studies"
Rebekah Shultz Colby

Dennis Lynch is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication, at Michigan Tech, where his many publications examine the theory and teaching of argument and argumentative writing, the conditions that make serious argument possible, empathy as a condition of argument, and the philosophy of rhetoric. A past editor of WPA: Writing Program Administration, Lynch has won the Braddock Award for the outstanding article in CCC. His PhD is from Berkeley.

Anne Frances Wysocki is Associate Professor of Visual and Digital Communication at Michigan Tech, educated there, at Berkeley, at Johns Hopkins, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Co-author of Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, Wysocki has produced some two dozen articles, chapters, and art projects. She is winner of the Institute for the Future of the Books Born Digital Competition for "Leaved Life," an interactive online illuminated manuscript, Computers and Writing Distinguished Book Award, and the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Anne Wysocki and Dennis Lynch opened their joint lecture with the thesis that there are resonances between the visual and the emotional Wysocki discussed the visual and Lynch discussed emotion. Certainly in Western culture they both have been dismissed because both have been perceived as opposed to reason. For instance, Lynn Worsham brings up how emotions have typically been received in contradictory ways: the pedagogy of emotion . . . teaches us to define and value emotion in a contradictory way negatively, in terms of its opposition to reason and rationality (as the core of the true self), and positively, in terms of its opposition to estrangement and disengagement from the world (76-80). Similarly, in critical theory, Jurgen Habermas reduces the visual in texts to mere formatting, lessening the intellectual work that the visual does in texts to ready-made convenience. When the visual is treated in scholarly work, it is usually treated in two ways as either production or product. In both cases, however, the visual is not adequately treated for itself. As production, visual design or film studies tends to see the visual as an unproblematic body that is standardized to the point of always being the same. There are a few nuts and bolts approaches to how to utilize the visual, but these approaches do not change according to audience, and, in fact, the audience is also perceived as always being the same. As product within critical theory, the visual is never adequately discussed because it is short-changed in favor of psychoanalytical theory or semiotics. This approach, of course, leaves out a range of works and tames the visual through words. Furthermore, instead of production, theorists are more interested in the mind work of analysis and what can be learned from images instead, which creates a mind/body split between the work of theory and the work of production. Of course, just as with emotion, there is also a contradiction in how the visual has been traditionally received within Western culture. Even though the visual has taken a marginal position to words, logos, the ancient Greeks thought sight was the highest sense, especially since it was seemingly detached from the body.

Despite the ways that western culture has traditionally dismissed emotion, recently there has been a wave of scholarly interest in studying emotion. For instance, Pierre Bourdieu has studied how emotions work with in socialization and social reproduction. Martha Nussbaum has studied how emotions form patterns narratively, and, in this way, follow their own narrative logic. She writes, Molloy [the Beckett character] suggests that the emotions are not discrete episodes inside his life story but, rather, the living out of a story that has a certain shape. Within rhetoric, there have been pressures to acknowledge the work emotion, or pathos, does within argument. Within composition, emotion has been absorbed pedagogically in three ways: emotion and arrangement, affect and invention, and desire and persuasion in general, although much more work needs to be done with emotion in rhet-comp.

Similarly, there has been a resurgence in using the visual within the rhet-comp classroom, particularly since newer technologies makes multi-modal text production easier. In this way, students can be taught both to analyze texts critically but also how to become an active participant and create effective visual texts themselves. Students then are no longer complicit within the western cultural tradition of splitting the mind from the body, but can more effectively learn how to write well if they can integrate both by analyzing texts, doing mind work, and producing more rhetorically effective texts, doing body work. Instead of splitting analysis and theory from production and thinking of production as a mindless body or just a set of arbitrary rules to follow that work just because they do students can use what they learn from analysis and theory of the visual to critically engage in their own production of visual texts.

It is difficult, however, to predict a future for how emotion or the visual will be researched or treated pedagogically. Studying emotion is difficult because, since it has been so ignored within western culture, scholars literally have to construct their own theories for studying it from the ground up. There are very few pre-existing theories that do it justice, and, as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari admit, it is difficult to invent new theories. Like lines of flight, there is always the possibility that in constructing new theories for emotion, something else new will escape notice. To make it even more difficult, every way that you talk about emotion gets you back into emotion. Because emotions are so intrinsic to the body, you literally become what you discuss as you discuss emotion. So separating emotion from the self in a way that allows it to be discussed adequately becomes extremely tricky, especially since emotion can so thoroughly shape our perceptions in ways that we do not even realize.

Regardless of this theoretical difficulty, however, teachers can no longer responsibly keep an emotional/visual split within composition classrooms. Writing needs to be presented as a series of choices that can be both visual and emotional in nature. Instead of just feeling a text, students should examine what work the emotion does rhetorically. In this way, they should be able to utilize their own emotions in rhetorically effective ways within their own written and visual texts.

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